Making your site RSS friendly

With all of the talk about RSS feeds, I figured this would be a good topic to cover.

Now that you've gotten your RSS feed(s) set up, it's a good time to check out your site from the viewpoint of someone entering your site via an RSS reader.

You can do this by looking at the <link> tag for your entries. If you're linking to your monthly archives (or weekly), be sure to anchor down to the correct post to make it easier on your reader. If you're linking to an individual post (my preferred place to "land"), then things are probably set up pretty well already.

In either case, you should make sure that your reader can easily navigate to your front page as well as links to next & previous (months, weeks, posts, whatever).

If you are linking to an individual post, it's probably a nice idea to have the comments listed on that page as that's (probably) why the person came to your site from their newsreader anyway. (And personally, I like the comments displayed with the oldest at the top.)

A comment form (or at the very least a link to the comment form) is required also.

Now, look at that page. Should you add some of the lnks that you have on your front page to these other pages? Again, it depends. When I go to a blog from my newsreader, I don't usually hit the front page. Just the pages with posts that caught my eye.

If you have any questions or want my opinion about anything else, please let me know.